What would you do with a USB keychain drive that stores a terabyte of data? For a price tag expected to be somewhere north of $2,000 (US$), Kingston Digital will have one for you.

On Monday, the Flash memory affiliate of memory product maker Kingston Technology Company announced its DataTraveler HyperX Predator line at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) now taking place in Las Vegas. The new line includes both USB 2.0 and 3.0 USB Flash drives, and the 3.0 version offers capacities up to 1TB, which the company said will be the largest such pocket drive in existence.

The 1TB version will be available within the first quarter of this year, and its smaller cousin, the 512GB version, is shipping now at a price of $1,750. The price on the terabyte product has not yet been released.

'Entire Digital World'

The new Predator offers the fastest 3.0 USB that Kingston makes, having obtained SuperSpeed USB 3.0 certification with transfer rates up to 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write when used with a USB 3.0 host controller. For a USB 2.0 host controller, speeds are 30 MB/s for read and write. The drive supports Windows 7 and 8, Vista, XP (SP3), Mac (10.6+), and Linux (kernel 2.6.+) machines.

Andrew Ewing, Kingston's Flash memory business manager, said in a statement that the new line "allows users to store their entire digital world on a portable USB 3.0 Flash drive" without any performance lag, including HD movies played back directly from the drive.

The new 3.0 product, which is backwards compatible with USB 2.0, is optimized for computers with USB 3.0 ports. It's targeted at users who work with video or graphics and would like to take all or a large chunk of their library with them. The company said the drive's zinc alloy metal casing provides superior quality and shock resistance, and it ships with a custom Kingston key ring, a HyperX valet keychain, a five year warranty and free technical support.

The company has also started shipping its DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Generation line of USB drives, featuring both USB 3.0 and 2.0 products. The line includes 64GB and 32GB models, and, in 3.0, read speeds up to 150MBps and write speeds reaching 70 MB/s. In the 2.0 version, those speeds are 30MB/s and 20MB/s, respectively.

Seagate and HP Storage News

In other storage news out of CES, Seagate has countered the move toward cloud-based storage for the home with the announcement of several new products. It's announced a new backup and media streaming product for the home called Seagate Central Shared Storage. It is designed for a living room AV rack, can function as a NAS and DLNA server, and additional software allows it to provide automatic backup of multiple PCs in the home or of photos stored on Facebook. Multimedia can also be streamed to, or accessed by, mobile devices.

Seagate's new Wireless Plus provides mobile storage for up to eight mobile devices on a Wi-Fi network. It only comes in a 1TB capacity and can hold up to 500 HD movies.

HP, not wanting Seagate to have all the fun, has announced its Pocket Playlist, a small-footprint wireless storage device for providing content for up to five mobile devices.

Tell Us What You Think

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Bubba:

Posted: 2013-01-07 @ 5:42pm PT

Cool, I can't wait for the 80TB keychain! Now can they get the file system to work properly with large format drives?